Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

What

Another reason that living in a courtyard house has its downsides… after the fifth day of enormous thunderstorms in a row the yard looks like Tewkesbury. At least it's built for it, sloping down away from the rooms, which I guess was deliberate, but it still means getting your feet wet to go to bed.

People's Liberation Army soldiers celebrate in Beijing

I'm also worried about the pond, which looks as if it's about to overflow. Will the fish be sensible enough to stick to the bottom, or will they try to make a forlorn dash for it?

Nothing like the poor folk of central China, of course, or even central England and Yorkshire. But it still feels like the Flood.

Meanwhile, the celebrations for the 80th Anniversary of the People's Liberation Army continue. I wrote a bit about it for the comment pages today, but at that stage I didn't know about the huge parade in the Great Hall of the People today, at which all of China's leaders past and present were out in full force – even Li Peng, who normally keeps a low profile when not trying to publish his book justifying his role in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

I still think it's odd that in all the festivities, and the endless state media odes to the role of the army in the New China, there's virtually no mention of, well, war.

OK, you don't want to press the fighting and winning aspect too hard when everyone's so nervous of China's rise, as I pointed out, but it's still a bit strange that you would have to look very hard to find what it's actually the 80th anniversary of.

There's this perfunctory and not very informative bit from Xinhua, but not much more.

I expect St John of Nanchang, aka Eric Blair, will have been as inundated with info as Pingan Dajie was with floodwater this evening.

But what about the rest of us? What about stirring tales and grainy footage to match of what those 80 years of military glory have all been about?

For those that need enlightening:

1 August was the date in 1927 of the failed Nanchang uprising, when Zhu De and Zhou Enlai tried to take the city in Jiangxi.

The failure led to the creation in the countryside of the Jiangxi Soviet, in which Mao and Zhu De led a guerrilla enclave before breaking out in the Long March.

I guess there's so little emphasis on the Civil War because it's being consciously and slowly reconstructed: more a national tragedy, from which the Communist Party emerged to build the New China, rather than the victory of good over evil.

The (defeated) Kuomintang, in its new incarnation as the opposition in Taiwan, is in the Party's good books for making friends in the face of the Taiwanese president's attempts to pursue a more independent line.

Also, of course, many people recognise that modern-day China has more in common with KMT China than Mao's China, so demonising the losing side makes not much sense.